Dakotas

We Minnesota writers by and large get our literary inspiration from the craggy promontories of Lake Superior and the pine rimmed lakes of our endless northern forests.

And it makes sense.  Who is not inspired by the waves crashing on the rocky shoreline of the greatest of the Great Lakes or the haunting call of a loon over placid sunset waters?

But somewhere along the way something unexpected happened to me:  I encountered the Dakotas, and that turned my eyes to the west and changed my life forever. 

I could not have imagined this.  North Dakota had always meant nothing to me but farms and tractors and endless miles of boredom.  And South Dakota was four stone heads carved into a mountain, and nothing else.  These were not places that fired the imagination.  They were places you avoided.  Time spent there was a penance.

But when we moved to northwestern Minnesota, just at the margin where the forests give way to the broad expanses of the prairies, the Dakotas began to whisper to me.  Instead of being drawn east to the loons and canoe country of our northern lakes and pines, I found myself being pulled magnetically into the vast openness of the plains and prairies to the west.

And what was it in this Dakota landscape that was drawing me?

Consider:

It is in the Dakotas that you first feel America turning its back on the forests and woodlands of the east and reorienting its spirit toward the west.  It is in the Dakotas where those settlers, confident in the power of the plow and hard labor, first had to gasp and stare out at an arid landscape and admit that their Biblical belief in tilling the land and making it bear fruit was too small a vision.  It is in the Dakotas where the sky first becomes bigger than the land and where dinosaur bones poke out through the earth. And it is in the Dakotas where the spirit of Native American not only resonates, but dominates.

Once I opened myself to these larger forces, there was no turning back.

So when it came time for me to write Lone Dog Road, the novel that had been percolating inside me for so long, it was only natural that I should set it in the land that had so touched my spirit and fired my imagination.

Soon enough you will have Lone Dog Road in your hands.  My solid and steady publisher, New World Library, has it scheduled for a March release, and this time that is rock solid.

It is my paean to our Western myth and the hard reality that lives beneath it, and the folks, Native and non-Native, who live, love, and struggle on this land that captures something so fundamental in our American spirit.

In the next few installments I will introduce you to some of these people.  I will also give you a look at the cover of the book as it evolves, because I love having you all involved in the process of the book’s creation.  After all, it was you by your voting and comments who gave me the title, Lone Dog Road.

And, lastly, I will offer you a way to sign up to be among the first to have Lone Dog Road as your book club selection, which will include a ZOOM visit with me and your group.

This has been a long time in coming, and it is going to be fun.